What's So Great About Beta Sp

lhmaloney

lhmaloney

Well-known member
I have a couple of local access through comcast (cable provider) shows that have to be transfered to beta sp. But now I have a carshow on september 30th, and I am doing a commercial which will be aired on certain regional cable channels (BET, MTV, SPEED, ESPN, ETC) And all of them want the footage converted to beta. What is so great about beta, why don't people take off the dvd or source files like mpeg or avi.
 
It's pretty simply this: BETA-SP works.


It's been the SD analog broadcast standard for so long that it's known to work and be compatible with everyone. You will be hard pressed to find a TV station or production facility that can't handle BETA-SP
I would find it very easy to find a DVD player that failed to play your disc properly. And computer media is iffy too because of codec problems.

BETA-SP records using uncompressed Component video, and that is THE standard for analog broadcast (AKA: "Broadcast Quality"). DVD, and MPEG are both highly compressed, and AVI is normally too (or then the files are too large to handle sensibly on computer media).

Just as in high end Digital SD production, the standard everything is normally measured by is Digital-BETACAM (DigiBETA), with stuff like DVCPRO-50 striving to match, and other formats being a compromise.

- Mikko
 
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I need to do avi to beta sp conversion for a national(Canadian) commercial as well. How do you do this? What software is necessary. I use Premiere 2.0, and After Effects 7.0, are they capable of this ?

Thanks
Ed
 
You need to be able to output uncompressed from your time line to a Beta SP deck. Best way would be to take your footage on a HDD to a post house and have then do it. It's cheap (I wana say we did it for $75-$100).
 
Y'know, back when I was doing local commercials the stations would sometimes ask for a BetaSP master (sometimes they wanted DVD, you can never tell). I went through the struggle to figure out the "right" way to do it, and in the end it came down to this:

Output the footage to a DV tape. Take that tape to a post-production house or tape duplication facility that has a DV/DVCAM/DVCPRO deck, and a BetaSP deck. They'll dub it over for you. Bring your own tapes (they were like $7 apiece from National Video Tape, vs. $25 at the post house) and the whole process is like $15.

If you're editing DV, DV is a component video format that's every bit a match for BetaSP. So it may sound cheap and lame to do it this way, but hey, if your footage is already in DV, DV is as good as it's gonna get. So just take a DV tape and dub it (as long as they dub it through component, and don't try to do an S-video or composite dub!)
 
As Mikko said, BSP is about as universal a format as you are going to get. Broadcasters also ask for everything on BSP because it would be a nightmare to try and support any format that could get thrown at them. DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, MiniDV, HDV-1, HDV-2, AVCHD, AVCIntra, NTS, PAL, SECAM, DigiBeta, D5, VHS, 3/4", 1", HDCAM, HDCAM SR, DVCPro50, DVCAM, DVCPro 25, XDCAM, XDCAM HD, IMX, Beta SX, DVCPro HD... and this isn't even touching on all the possible codecs you could cram onto a HDD.

A lot of people spent a lot of time and money developing tried and true tape work flows and they aren't going to change until those machines die and there is no way to fix them. Not to long ago a company I worked for had to deliver finished spots to MTV2 on 3/4" of all things.

-A
 
Local broadcast stations and cable providers are not fond of spending dollars on equipment upgrades, trust me I used to write capital budgets proposals for them,

Beta SP is solid no doubt, but as Berry mentioned DV is the same color space 4.1.1. The reason beta SP still is used in 40% of most stations in the US as the primary playback and acquisition format is simply cost. Station groups and cable providers feel they will not see a quick return on the upgrade costs so why do it? The only thing pushing them forward is the FCCs push to digital which has been pushed back numerous times already.

My feeling is the Beta SP UVW and PVW series of Sony decks will be around for another 10 years easily.
 
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